31–40 of 67 posts
Nearly every comment on the NYT site makes the same point: buses are unreliable, and filled with homeless, mentally unstable or drugged people who make them a terrifying experience. What is the response of cities? Kneecap the alternatives like Uber/Lyft, or spend taxpayers' money not on fixing those two problems but on ridiculous ideas like paying people to take the bus. Almost as if the people are here to serve the…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We did the opposite in Seattle and have seen impressive results. In 2014, we voted--in the city, after a countywide measure failed--to tax ourselves to buy a whole lot more service hours from the county transit agency. Originally this was because slumping sales tax income was going to force the county to cut service but, instead, sales tax income came roaring back and the city was able to buy so much extra service fr…
> But, of course, no good thing goes untouched. Last year, statewide voters approved an initiative that guts Seattle's ability to tax ourselves for transit ("$30" car tabs, which are nothing of the sort since even that initiative doesn't reduce vehicle registration costs to $30). This was utterly maddening. A bunch of... Politically-opinionated persons in rural Washington voted for legislature that bans Seattle from…
Fun fact for folks in Seattle, San Diego, Tampa, Washington, D.C., Spokane, etc: Professor Kari Watkins, mentioned in the article, is the co-creator of OneBusAway. OneBusAway, or OBA, in case you aren't familiar with it, is an open source real time transit information system, and includes a full backend, plus iOS and Android client apps. OBA had belonged to the University of Washington until recently, when it was spu…
In New York, specifically, it's not much of a mystery - the incredibly close stop spacing and inefficient boarding procedures make it so the bus is barely faster than walking. Most buses stop almost every block, they board through a single door, and they use the two slowest payment methods available in almost any system (cash and magnetic strip cards). However, I don't expect this to change anytime soon, because many…
At first it was because my personal schedule, and my bus schedule changed just enough to make it annoying to make it to work on time, and almost impossible to avoid routes that spent most of their time in an extremely high crime area. So most of the time I drove to the train.
Then I got a new job working from home, and I stopped taking the bus and the train. I must say that I miss the bus quite a bit. It was the most books I've ever read recreationally. I even taught myself python on the bus, which lead to the new job.
I also used to take the bus when I thought I would be drinking, and uber/lyft have completely replaced that.
Nearly every comment on the NYT site makes the same point: buses are unreliable, and filled with homeless, mentally unstable or drugged people who make them a terrifying experience. What is the response of cities? Kneecap the alternatives like Uber/Lyft, or spend taxpayers' money not on fixing those two problems but on ridiculous ideas like paying people to take the bus. Almost as if the people are here to serve the…
Are uber and lyft really bus alternatives?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I stopped riding the bus mainly due to social reasons: there was always somebody on every trip watching TV on their phone without headphones. And people stopped waiting for others to disembark before boarding. That's the weirdest thing: the bus stops, the doors open, and the people waiting to board just start piling in before the people coming off have left. Maybe that's only in SF. And then there's this: > In Gavin…
It is the stacking social ills problem. If SF had an effective set of homeless policies/programs then they wouldn't misuse the bus. While it is true that people respect "free" services less than paid ones, I have yet to read any reports from places that have implemented free bus service that suggested general damage/misuse due to a lack of respect. The bus service in Logan UT for example is pretty awesome.
Nearly every comment on the NYT site makes the same point: buses are unreliable, and filled with homeless, mentally unstable or drugged people who make them a terrifying experience. What is the response of cities? Kneecap the alternatives like Uber/Lyft, or spend taxpayers' money not on fixing those two problems but on ridiculous ideas like paying people to take the bus. Almost as if the people are here to serve the…
Are uber and lyft really bus alternatives?